Classic & Contemporary Excerpts from January 15, 1990

Let the year be given to God in its every moment! The year is made up of minutes: let these be watched as having been dedicated to God! It is in the sanctification of the small that hallowing of the large is secure.

Divine Divination

[P]art of the equipment we need for life in a secular setting is the ability to discern spirits. It takes advanced Christian training to learn to tell the difference between, say, patriotism and chauvinism, between piety that is superficial and piety that is profound, between the mind of humanism and the mind of Christ. Trying to do this in a secular college is like trying to diet at Kentucky Fried Chicken.

—Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., in the Banner (Oct. 16, 1989)

Outside And Involved

You are the church.… I am not the church or the archdiocese of New York. I am its formal official teacher. You are the church—and thousands and hundreds of thousands like you. I want you involved. I believe that Christ wants you involved.

—John Cardinal O’Connor,

preaching at Saint Patrick’s

Cathedral in New York, quoted in

the New Yorker, (March 30, 1987)

Real Thanks-Living

If anyone would tell you the shortest, surest way to happiness and all perfection, he must tell you to make it a rule to yourself to thank and praise God for everything that happens to you. For it is certain that whatever seeming calamity happens to you, if you thank and praise God for it, you turn it into a blessing.